Female Privilege: A Few Examples

"Check your Male Privilege" gets my nomination for the most pretentious phrase coming from feminist circles.  Usually, a man is trying to make an important point to a feminist or discuss nuances to proposed policies and gets shut down by a feminist or another useful idiot parroting this phrase.  Accusing a man of "mansplaining" comes in a close second of pseudo intellectual tripe that is passing for feminist scholarship these days.

In some contexts reminding somebody of their privilege is necessary.  For example when trying to a raise a mature and well-adjusted child, parents might need to remind little Timmy, while he complains about not getting that PlayStation, that some children in the world don't get to have a Merry Christmas and he should count his blessings. That's the whole justification that feminists use when accusing men of Male Privilege--as a reminder of how good men have it so they should shut up and let the women speak.

It might be worth reminding people that Female Privilege also exists and we waste no time or effort enabling it or deferring to it.  Here are a some examples:

Christine Blasey Ford Testifies at Kavanaugh Senate Confirmation Hearings

A woman claiming that some sort of sexual assault happened to her 30 years ago without any clear recollection, corroborating evidence or witnesses wouldn't have much of a case.  The police wouldn't have enough grounds to arrest or hold the suspect, no prosecutor would choose to try the case, and a judge would likely dismiss it if it ever got far enough to be argued in court.

But during the Judge Kavanaugh confirmation hearing in the US Senate, we were reminded that it wasn't a court of law, but a court of public opinion, and in the court of public opinion women must be believed!  So the whole country had to hold its breath while Christine Blasey Ford was flown in to testify in front of the Senate at Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing and the FBI to conduct an investigation into her claims.

Christine Blasey Ford from Getty Images

When all was said and done, we find that Judge Kavanaugh was a typical college student.  He went to parties and drank beer while still managing to graduate from the top law school in the country.  He later served the country with distinction as a judge.  Judge Kavanaugh was more than qualified to be a justice on the US Supreme Court.

Lurking in the shadows of this spectacle was the possibility that the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy would give the Supreme Court a solid conservative majority for the first time in decades.  This political shift could threaten Roe v Wade.  There was plenty of female privilege invoked when Blasey Ford was selected as our victim of the week to derail a confirmation hearing.  But what this was really about was Roe v Wade.  It's the Supreme Court precedent that allowed women to terminate a baby's life if it was still inside the womb.  This is the pinnacle of female privilege in modern society.

There's also the leftist talking point that women "need to be believed" that led to our willingness to allow Blasey Ford to testify in the first place.  Sorry, but women lie all the time, even about rape.  Unless she gives birth to the son of God, a woman is a lying, burping, farting human being like the rest of us.

Donald Trump Backpedals 

Donald Trump tapped into a wellspring of angst and anger with the American public that was instrumental in the victory of his campaign to become President of the United States.  As one example, not only did he survive the public and media backlash about his comments on illegal immigration, he thrived!  Everything he said was resonating well with enough of the American public and he was admired for not backing down when confronted with criticism and hysteria.  This made him a candidate without equal.

But there were two exceptions:

1. The Access Hollywood Tape:

On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, a recording of Donald Trump boasting about his experiences with women to Billy Bush from Access Hollywood was leaked to the news media:

"When you are rich and famous like me, gold digging whores start throwing pussy at you like yesterday's donuts!"

Actually, that wasn't what Trump said.  Here is what he really said:

"You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful--I just start kissing them.  It's like a magnet.  Just kiss.  I don't even wait.  And when you're a star, they let you do it.  You can do anything.
Grab 'em by the pussy.  You can do anything."

Admit it.  The second quote sounds a lot tamer than the first quote I wrote above, despite both quotes containing the word, pussy.  So now what Trump said doesn't seem so bad by comparison.  For those of us that weren't born yesterday, this is the natural order of things for rich and powerful men.  Men such as Trump regularly participate in high status activities and venues that beautiful women also attend hoping to bag a rich husband.  My first quote simply expresses this fact more crudely than Trump said in the second quote.  So why the faux outrage?

Presently, our cultural zeitgeist is averse to describing, or even speculating, about the callous and unflattering parts of women's nature.  You might think that what Trump said reflected poorly on himself but that's because your brain is broken.  It actually, reflected poorly on women by describing the mercenary nature that the sisterhood pursues relationships with men of influence. In fact, unless we are describing women in the most agreeable and glowing terms possible, our political and professional lives could be at risk.  Trump's quote disrupted this paradigm.

This is the power of Female Privilege.  Female Privilege is so strong that it forced a man who gained a reputation for fighting, never giving up, and never backing down to publicly apologize for the remarks.  At least Trump won the presidential election.  Billy Bush didn't fare so well and all he did was laugh according to the leaked tape.

2.  In Regards to Women and Abortion:

Also, during the 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that women that have abortions should suffer "some form of punishment" if the procedure were to be banned in the United States.

It would be impossible to overstate the backlash that immediately followed.

The prolife position in the abortion debate suggests that abortion is the murder of an unborn child.  Everybody knows this.  So it would stand to reason that a women would be complicit in such a murder along with her doctor or anybody else that enabled her.

Trump was also running for President as a Republican candidate.  Republicans tend to be prolife and argue for restricting or outright banning abortion.  So we would expect Trump to adopt this position also.

But in today's political climate, Republicans not only have to constantly disavow David Duke and the KKK, they also have to issue disclaimers that they will allow abortions in the case of rape or incest.  It's the unwritten rule if you're a card-carrying Republican.

Trump not only touched the third rail in the abortion debate, he grabbed it with both hands.  Republicans allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest because refusing abortion under these circumstances is seen as allowing a woman to be victimized twice.  Our empathy for women is so great that it allowed our society to allow women to abort their unborn children in the first place.  Despite Republican opposition to the practice they still allow a woman to abort an unborn child if certain conditions are met.

That's the power of Female Privilege!  And such privilege compelled Trump to walk back his comments and suggest that only the doctors should face some punishment.

I only have one question: What if the doctor is also a woman?

...A discussion for another time!

The Veto of Alimony Reform in Florida Because of NOW.

More and more women are entering higher and higher paid positions that used to be male dominated.  It's quite the accomplishment in modern times.  It shows how far we've come.  But from a female privilege perspective there is an unintended side effect.  More and more divorced women are paying alimony to their ex husbands.

It is hardly an epidemic, however.  According to the 2010 census only 3% of divorced women are paying alimony.  But female privilege holds that if even one women is harmed or inconvenienced (read: suffering the consequences of her own actions!), then we have to reorganize society to accommodate their whims.

In Florida, lifetime alimony still exists and only a handful of women have to pay it due to them being the primary breadwinner in the marriage.  But a handful is one handful too many!

So, at some women's behest, in 2013 the Florida State Legislature send Governor Rick Scott a bill that effectively ended lifetime alimony except in extreme cases, such as where recipients are disabled or some other extenuating circumstances.  The bill was passed with bipartisan support and enjoyed overwhelming support among the public.  However, in the last moment the Florida chapter of NOW convinced Governor Scott to veto the bill.  It seems that NOW saw some problems with the bill.  The bill presumed joint custody of children as the default arrangement and mandated that judges consider this as a starting point when considering divorce settlements.  NOW persuades Governor Scott to veto the bill.

So not only is female privilege allowing NOW an unprecedented last-minute conference with a head of state at a moments notice to persuade him to veto a bill that they don't like, but it acts to preserve another female privilege that was being threatened by the alimony reform bill--the default assumption of female custody of the children in divorce proceedings.

In 2016 the Florida State Legislature takes another crack at alimony reform and introduces a bill that still attempts to limit lifetime alimony to the most extenuating circumstances while also addressing the concerns that NOW had with the original bill.  The bill still enjoyed bipartisan and public support.

Again, at the last possible moment NOW exercises its female privilege, yet again, and convinces Governor Scott to veto the bill.

Alimony reform may or may not come to pass in Florida, but how in a world with so much male privilege and a state government that is predominantly male dominated is a woman's organization allowed to kill any attempts at reform that would threaten a few female privileges such as presumed female custody and lifetime alimony?

Feminists loot The American (Women) Recovery and Investment Act 2009

During the Great Recession over 5 million of the lost jobs came from the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy.  About 80% of those lost jobs were jobs previously held by men.  Some economists were dubbing the downturn a "mancession" to explain the catastrophic unemployment rates being suffered by men as a group compared to women.

Male unemployment rapidly outpaced Female unemployment during the Great Recession.
Source: Mark Perry, University of Michigan

Like a good Keynesian, Obama chose to address the crisis with a stimulus program worth $787 BILLION!  The stimulus was to fund a series of shovel-ready projects to modernize our roads, bridges, electrical grids, schools and other infrastructure projects over a period of two years.  For many policy makers, this had a lot of win-win potential.  The stimulus would rescue a lot of jobs in the hardest hit sectors during the recession, manufacturing and construction.  It would also create and modernize infrastructure that would facilitate additional long term growth that could offset the massive government debt that would be incurred from the spending bill.

But to those of us who weren't born yesterday, to implement such an ambitious project while keeping government waste and corruption to a minimum would be a monumental undertaking.  A $787 billion jackpot would be too tempting of a cash cow for many special interests to ignore and it would severely undermine the government's ability to disperse the money where it was needed.  Because most of these special interests were feminists and other women's groups, the task was impossible.

Literally overnight, sorority journalists across the country sprung into action and criticized the program with headlines and editorials that can best be summarized as, What 'bout da wimminz?  Very quickly women's groups flexed and leveraged their Female Privilege and lobbied members at the highest echelons of our government demanding their share of the stimulus and got virtually everything that they demanded.  Christina Hoff Sommers writes about how giddy feminists were about their success in diverting so much of the stimulus to their pet projects:

In her March "Below the Belt" column on the NOW website, Kim Gandy could not contain her elation over "this happily-ever-after 'stimulus story.' " When she and her allies saw the final recovery package, they were amazed to find "over and over" versions of "very specific proposals that we had made." More than that, the programs NOW had proposed had vast sums of money next to them--"numbers that started with a 'B' (as in billion)," Gandy said gleefully. "It's impossible to convey just how many hours we put into this issue during December and early January and how fruitful it really turned out to be."

The rest is history.  Congress passes and President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and sealed its fate as one of the most wasteful government spending projects of the postwar era. According to some investigative reporting published in the Associated Press, $300 billion of the stimulus that was sent to the states ended up funding unemployment benefits (wouldn't need to be paid if you spent the money putting people back to work), social services (they tend to benefit women), training programs (so that women learn how to do the same jobs to replace the ones men had already lost) and a myriad of programs in education and healthcare.

In the end, only $111 billion went to infrastructure:

from Wikipedia

In a broader sense, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act serves as a precautionary tale as to why many of us oppose higher taxation and government spending.  We know where the money ends up.  It creates bigger and more invasive government while diverting wealth from producers to nonproducers and from men to women.  In the aftermath, whether or not the stimulus actually helped the US economy recover is still debatable.  Even if it was helpful, can you imagine how quick and explosive the recovery might have been if Female Privilege allowed the full $787 billion to actually be invested in infrastructure?

Now, President Trump wants to implement an infrastructure development program of his own.  All I can say to Trump if he's reading is, be careful!  If you don't have the balls to say "no" to these snowflakes then history will repeat and you'll have very little to show for it.

Preferential Hiring of Female Candidates for Jobs.

Large successful companies such as Amazon can be a victim of their own success.  Due to their success and prestige, they need to rapidly locate and recruit talent from a competitive labor pool to keep their business on an upward trajectory.  So a group within Amazon developed an AI to sort through resumes to identify the best candidates.  The fantasy was that Amazon HR can feed a bunch of resumes into the AI and it would identify the cream of the crop and that's who they would contact to be interviewed and hired.

The only problem was that the AI seemed to prefer male candidates!  After some effort to fix the apparent bias unsuccessfully, Amazon gave up and shut down the project.  So what went wrong?

The AI was "taught" what to look for on resumes by feeding it resumes from employees that Amazon had already deemed good enough to hire.  This makes sense.  Amazon ostensibly hired the best candidates that they could find to be employees so they would want to instruct the AI to find candidates like the ones they hired.

The group at Amazon only seemed to get suspicious of the results when there were too many men that were being  selected by the AI as potential candidates.   I'm not trying to evaluate the AI or suggest what Amazon should have done to fix the problem.  I don't know that much about AI.  But I will point out that Amazon couldn't have known that the AI was selecting too many men if the whole purpose of the project is to identify the most qualified candidates.  Amazon certainly would have noticed if they wanted the AI to find good programmers and it returned recommendations for auto mechanics instead.  

But what does gender have to do with being a good programmer?  Nothing! So how is it possible to say that the the AI selected too many men unless Amazon's hiring practices are biased in favor of women at the expense of men?

Amazon is pretty tight-lipped about the details of their AI experiment so we can't independently verify how the AI made it's decisions from the data it was given.  However, I imagine that a decent AI might have come to a few conclusions that nobody will want to discuss which I suspect is why the Amazon shut down the project so abruptly.

Did the AI conclude from the employee resumes that it was given that men will be better programmers?  Men do excel in the logic and reasoning skills necessary for being a good programmer.

Do male candidates craft better resumes for the positions that they are seeking?  The Reuters article seemed to suggest as much,

the technology favored candidates who described themselves using verbs more commonly found among male engineers' resumes, such as "executed" and "captured"

Do men tend to attend colleges that are noted for producing good programmers?  Again, the Reuters article seems to suggest this,

..it downgraded graduates of two all-women's colleges, according to people familiar with the matter.  They did not specify the names of the schools.

Was there additional information besides the resumes that was fed to the AI such as the employee files?  Perhaps the AI realized that women take more sick days than men which led the AI to penalizing women's resumes?  The list goes on and on.

Lastly, it seemed interesting to me that when Amazon's engineers tried to program the AI to ignore gender, or gender related descriptors, it returned meaningless results.

Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms.  But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory[...]Problems with the data that underpinned the models' judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs, the people said.  With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project.

Amazon's AI results do happen to agree with other experiments were researchers would provide gender blinded or gender ambiguous applications and resumes to hiring managers and professors for them to determine who they would call for interviews or hire. Experimental results indicate that more men tend to be selected when the hiring managers don't know the gender of the applicant and have to rely solely on the content of the resume or application.

All of this seems to suggest that Amazon and a lot of other companies skew their hiring practices in favor of women.  I would suggest that companies do this to avoid anti-discrimination claims and lawsuits.  I can't blame them for this reaction but it suggests another Female Privilege that's operating in society.

...Plus a lot more Female Privilege

At this point the reader may object that what I described as isolated incidents and that women, in general, suffer from an oppressive patriarchy and diminished prospects in our society, but this would be wrong.  My examples are meant to demonstrate that Female Privilege is so influential in our society that even the rich and powerful must defer to it.  Seriously, would a confirmation hearing from a Supreme Court Justice have been derailed if Christian Blasey Ford was a guy making those claims?  What if Donald Trump joked about giving guys wedgies instead of kissing and groping women with Billy Bush?  We would have collectively rolled our eyes and moved on.  It's only when women or their interests are front and center is when anything gets taken seriously.  Even when a women's issue may not be front and center there are many feminists and their enablers to insure that women are always considered first. In fact, a massive stimulus bill intended to help the men that were most effected by the economic downturn during the Great Recession got raided and looted by Female Privilege with very little of it helping the disadvantaged sectors.

This essay was inspired by recent events.  But for the skeptics out there that think these are the exceptions and not the rule, Female Privilege benefits women in many more mundane ways:

• Women are presumed to be friendlier and better caretakers and this assumption justifies everything from preferential hiring practices in the health care and customer service industries to receiving primary custody of children during divorce settlements.
• The majority of the student body at our Universities are women and they also receive the majority of degrees.
• Women also receive more scholarships.
• Women receive suffrage without reciprocal obligations to the state such as selective service or the draft during a time of war.
• Women control the majority of household spending.
• Women often have more fashion choices available to them and often take greater liberties with dress codes.
• Women are more likely to receive aid from strangers when in a state of distress.
• The majority of social spending and social safety nets are for the benefit of women.
• In regards to our justice system:
1. Women are less likely to have an encounter with police
2. If women have an encounter with police, they are less likely to be shot or arrested.
3. If arrested, women are less likely to be charged or have charges brought against her by another citizen.
4. If arrested and charged she is less likely to be put on trial.
5. If put on trial a women has a greater likelihood of presumed innocence.
6. Women are also less likely to be found guilty
7. Women are also more likely to receive a plea bargain
8. Women are also more likely to be charged with a lessor crime than a man would if he committed the same offense.
9. If a women is charged and convicted with a similar crime than a man would be charged with, she will likely receive a lighter sentence.
10. A women is more likely to be granted parole
11. A women is less likely to be on death row
12. Women are less likely to be sued.

(And yes, I know this wouldn't be an issue if men would just stop breaking the law.  However, we are currently clutching our pearls and calling for reforms over all those black men in our prisons.  So I thought I would include these as female privileges.)

• Women are less likely to be employed in strenuous and hazardous jobs.
• Women are less likely to die on the job.
• Women have longer life expectancy.
• Women have a right to opt out of parenthood (via abortion or adoption)
• Women are the presumed victims in the Duluth Model of Domestic Violence.
• Women are more likely to receive higher tips in the service industry.
• Women won't incur a social penalty if they chose to stay at home and be a homemaker.
• There isn't a social penalty if a women earns less than her spouse.
• Women rarely take social risks involved with dating and courtship.  They rarely pay for dates.
• Women pay less in taxes while being the primary recipients of social spending
• Women tend to receive primary custody of the children after divorce, if joint custody is awarded, the children tend to spend most of their time with the mother.  
• Women are less likely to pay child support or alimony as part of a divorce settlement.

I'll stop here for the sake of brevity but I could continue.  No doubt that we can come up with a load of male privileges as well.  I'm not trying to point out that women have it so easy in life.  That isn't the point of this essay.  But men and women are different and have different abilities and deficiencies.  So logically, we'll face different challenges and hardships as well.  

There are some situations where it sucks being a guy.  You don't hear much about male suffering because guys that complain receive social censure while women that complain get believed and taken seriously.  So it might be more effective the next time women chastise men to check their privilege to remind women how much privilege they do enjoy the next time they start complaining about being oppressed.